12 JULY — 12 AUGUST 2018

ARCHIVE

FESTIVAL EXTRAS & SOÇIAL 2017

Peter Stamer (DE)

Imaginary Performance House

An accessible installation by Peter Stamer and ImPulsTanz, realized in the frame of the European project Life Long Burning.

From 24 July to 13 August, the Berlin based theatre maker Peter Stamer will build, together with the international artists Lyndsey Housden (NL), Vladimir Miller (AT), Dušan Murić (RS), Ofelia Jarl Ortega (SE), Octavian Prosetan (RO), Juli Reinartz (DE), Florian Tröbinger (AT), Yosi, Wanunu (AT), Paul Wenninger (AT) et al., a Imaginary Performance House in the frame of ImPulsTanz. The 200 squaremeter measuring installation will be constructed in the top floor of the former Viennese post and telegraph office.

„We must open our empty hands and show that really there is nothing up our sleeves. Only then can we begin.“
Peter Brooks, The Rough Theatre In: The Empty Space

We tackle the question of how to create a space from a virtual angle. So instead of using manifest building material we create a virtual space with the help of performative narratives. Using methods of visualisation we look more thoroughly into what it is to create a 'common imaginary’. Looking at the given theatre situation in f.e. Vienna next to the aesthetic question there is an actual need to fantasize together in order to fight off or at least become aware of the threats knocking on the door - not just in Austria but all over in Europe and beyond.
So 11 people from various backgrounds – directors, performers, visual artists, an architect and dancers – set out to create an ‘IMAGINARY PERFORMANCE HOUSE’.

Taking on narrative techniques this research project starts with performing our collective imagination in order to develop further and alternative aesthetic strategies that 'create worlds’ by words, bodies, movement, with the help of our most precious faculty: imagination and creativity. We play around a lot, enter a physically enacted idea of architectural planning and create space by means of choreography, narration, along the fault lines of wording worlds and ‘worlding’ (if this word exists at all). So, in a nutshell, we point to the future which we try to ‘remember’ in an emancipatory and politically intense process of creating and claiming space.
And we come empty handed.

Opening of the process: Tue, 08 August 2017, 15:00–18:00Free admission!